What is the difference between prompt-toolkit and prompt_toolkit

Question

I recently ran a conda list, and I find that I have two different packages called prompt-toolkit 3.0.4 and prompt_toolkit 3.0.4. I tried to google the difference between them, using essentially the exact wording of my question title, and all that came up was documentation on prompt_toolkit, which did not answer the question. I would like to understand the difference between these packages, so that I can understand why I need both, and when to use which?

Answer 1

prompt_toolkit is a meta-package and serves as an alias of prompt-toolkit. prompt_toolkit=3.0.4 has only one dependency prompt-toolkit=3.0.4 and does nothing apart from that. Therefore whenever you install prompt_toolkit, you will pull in prompt-toolkit with the same version (major.minor.patch).

You can see this by using conda search --info

conda search --info prompt_toolkit=3.0.4

Gives you

prompt_toolkit 3.0.4 0
----------------------
file name   : prompt_toolkit-3.0.4-0.conda
name        : prompt_toolkit
[...]
dependencies:
  - prompt-toolkit >=3.0.4,<3.0.5.0a0

For functionality you only need prompt-toolkit, but prompt_toolkit exists as a compatibility layer.